Shane Taylor takes a look at the latest issue of Framelines street photography magazine featuring Janet Delaney’s beautiful Rolleiflex photos of 80s New York City, along with photos by Baldwin Lee, John Simmons, Anya Broido, Oscar Diaz and Jonathan Bertin.
A Twin Lens Reflex camera, especially a Rolleiflex has always felt like the best of camera options when shooting street photography since the photographer does not shoot with the camera at eye level, which tends to draw attention from people in the street. I have used my DLSR’s with a tilt screen at waist level when shooting before to emulate the experience of shooting with a TLR but it simply is not the same as the real thing. It simply does not work as well and seems odd for good reason.
Framelines did a nice job of featuring other photographers, Baldwin Lee, John Simmons, Anya Broido, Oscar Diaz and Jonathan Bertin, in this video as well as the current issue of their wonderful quarterly street photography magazine.
The recent resurgence of film photography has fascinated me to the point that now, years after it began, I finally decided to go back to my film/darkroom days where my interest in photography is rooted and shoot my first roll of film for the first time since the mid 1990s.
As one who was schooled and worked many days and hours on end in darkrooms over several years, I thought getting back into film after 20+ years of digital photography shouldn’t be difficult at all. That said much has changed with the new incarnation of film. For one, Kodachrome is no longer available for color film photography, my absolute favorite for capturing the best 35mm images back in the day. Most of what I did in school/work during my early days of photography was of a commercial nature, so technically perfect and high-quality realistic sharp images were what was in high demand. There was nothing like processing an 8 x 10 color transparency in the darkroom and taking a look at it after it dried, and it was almost looking like the real subject, not a positive image since the resolution was so high and grain almost invisible! Creative photography was not something I was involved with professionally but was my favorite genre on a purely artistic level. Black and white gilm photography was paramount for me in the creative realm then and still is today in the digital world.
This all brings me to today, and my planned venture into black and white photography after decades away. As mentioned, much has changed since then, so to venture forth, I wanted to begin with a familiar “constant” from my past. With that said, I decided to go with the first two basics, a camera and film. I chose my Nikon Photomatic FTN 35mm camera I’ve owned since 1974 for my camera and Kodak Tri-X 400 for my film. While Kodachrome was my favorite color film, but it is long gone. Kodak Tri-X 400 was my favorite black and white and needless to say. I was elated when I found it is available today!
I am looking forward to this endeavor and still looking at film processing and print options. To get the most out Kodak Tri-X 400 film, they closely work together, almost one and the same. I was never able to get all the creative and extraordinary images out of Kodak Tri-X 400 back in the day that others did, so now is my chance to make happen, what didn’t back then.
When I read the title of this article, I really could not think of a reason silver cameras would be better than black. Then I read it, and the reason makes perfect sense. For someone like me, who has lived through and coped with a lifetime of very hot and bright sunny summers, the reason should have been obvious.
I am still “reflecting” on that reason, and my experience on a hot sunny day last September when my sliver “pocket” Leica took over after my black Samsung phone camera overheated and crashed without warning on a photo walk. The details in this article go into more detail on the how and why on that. It was definitely a lesson learned.
AI is good at many things. If you want surrealistic and nightmarish imagery, AI inadvertently does that very well. AI is simply unparalleled in that regard when it comes to drawing hands at this point in its bizarre evolution. AI has mastered that “hands” down!
When I was in photography school years ago, besides learning all the facets of working with film photography, we also studied the history of photography, including the biographies of the great photographers from its roots to the present.
Of all those, I found Alfred Stieglitz one of the most fascinating. He was schooled in engineering but was a pioneer who took photography beyond the technical and just capturing images, into the aesthetic , artistic world of infinite creative possibilities. His life spanned a time of significant geopolitical events and modernization that changed the world. His life with Georgia O’Keefe helped further assimilate photography into an expressive art from. He was a skilled photographic technician but also excelled in whatever genre and style of photography he chose to work in.
If anyone enjoys art, photography, history and a good story as much as I do, but is not aware of the life and work of Alfred Stieglitz, then I would suggest you take a look at the brilliant legacy he left behind to enrich our lives.
This is a very entertaining video that is spot on as far as what I would miss most if I gave up my DSLR and why. I am more about final images than gear and what will ensure I get what I want in that regard, without the hassle, and at an affordable price. What he misses about his DSLR here is not just an inconvenience for me, but can be a show stopper in getting the best images, when I want them, when I see them, without fail, under all conditions. The battery power hog that Mirrorless cameras are was off-putting to me when they were first released and still are now. When my camera battery died after a longer than expected and unplanned day of walking around on my one and only trip to Key West in 2003, I almost missed once-in-a-lifetime shots of the sunset at Mallory Square. It was over, the battery was gone after my very last shot. (I know the lecture and remedy that is returned when I tell that story, but it can, and does happen to the best of us). Still, that was a “never again” moment for me, but I have gotten close a few times in spite of my best-laid plans. The screen clutter on Mirrorless cameras can get messy and hard to work around under certain conditions. The list goes on. That said, Mirrorless Cameras are the future and the advantages are numerous and well known. I am not a Luddite and am a Pragmatist, which means I go with “what works” in most everything. When it comes to photography, “what works” is having a great and lasting image to talk about in the end.
This is a picture I took at sundown of a Bell UH-1D Iroquois Huey Helicopter on static display. Because of the fading light, I was able to capture a nice, silhouetted image of its iconic shape contrasted against a muted gradient of transitioning sky colors at twilight. For those interested, this aircraft is on permanent static display at the Frontiers of Flight Museum at Love Field in Dallas Texas. There is a wonderful history behind this particular helicopter and it is a story worth checking out. You can find it in the link below.
This is an excellent article on how photographic images are both perceived and preconceived, as well as the depth of creative and technical skills it takes to bring them into existence and be noticed.
I have often said that when capturing images, as soon as the camera shutter closes one has visually captured the past. It may not feel that way while in the moment, but it will become increasingly apparent as time passes and the captured image is revisited.
Shooting Photographs sometimes begins and ends in one day for me with a 2 step process of capturing images, then downloading them to my computer. Once downloaded, unless I am time-limited, it may be some time before I get around to revisiting some of those images. It is later, when going through my tens of thousands of images, that I often “rediscover” images that I had forgotten about and depending on how much time has passed, may have taken on some level of historical significance. This picture was taken the last (and 20th) time the Trinity River crested above 40ft, a literal “high water mark” that has only been exceeded 22 times since the flood of 1908, before the Dallas levee system was built. Only time will tell if this image will gain any real historical significance, but for me, it created an opportunity to experience a nice morning at daybreak in order to capture a rare image of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge with the Dallas skyline reflected in a body of water that is the flooded Trinity River. I am not sure when an opportunity like that will arise again but was happy to recently “rediscover” this image.
